Consumers love them. The feeling of bagging their purchase at a lower price undoubtedly releases the feel-good hormone, oxytocin. Publishers see them as the difference between converting a customer or seeing a sale attributed elsewhere. They’ve become a visceral behaviour associated...

Last month, there was another brouhaha in the programmatic ad world. It was revealed that was a new ad-buying practice was happening and apparently very few people knew that it is going on.

Devised by the ad marketplace Index Exchange and hailed as the latest innovation in programmatic bidding we discovered a practice called ‘bid caching’. New technology that was designed to reduce latency, thereby creating faster ad serving. It...

Having a solid content strategy and a customer-centric approach to your marketing is vital to growing your business. Avoiding the three pitfalls below can help you stay on track to building long-term, profitable customer relationships and put you on the path to enhanced ROI.

Pitfall 1: Losing your focus on content

Google announced yesterday that customers of its Display & Video 360 services (formerly DoubleClick Bid Manager) can now select to only run campaigns on publishers with ads.txt authorised inventory, excluding those that aren’t compliant.

Ads.txt is a standard introduced by the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab (IAB) to combat ad fraud through domain spoofing. By adding an ads.txt file to their sites, publishers are able to list the exchanges and networks that are authorised to sell...

In the early days of digital advertising, hopes were high that the industry was entering a new era of accountability. And, for a while, it did. When everyone used one browser and one device, tracking tools such as the cookie functioned as a viable approximation of individuals that powered accurate measurement and attribution.

However, times have changed.

Not only do consumers make their activity harder to trace by using multiple connected devices — at least three per...

What do shag carpets, landlines, and display advertising all have in common? The heyday for each has long since passed. And in the case of display ads, a shiny and new alternative — one that blends word-of-mouth buzz with high frequency — has emerged: influencer marketing.

It’s easy to understand why influencers have more reach than website banners or YouTube adverts. Our company did a joint study with Nielsen on consumer conduct, and we found that

Twenty years ago Joseph Pine and James Gilmore welcomed us all to the “Experience Economy” in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). They claimed that ‘services’ alone were not enough to satisfy experience-hungry consumers, and that “staging experiences” would generate more value. Although the examples they used were more physical experiences (aka Niketown) than digital experiences, they had rightly identified a pivotal moment in history.

2018, the year of deadlines. Or, more specifically, the year of internet security deadlines. It turns out that the EU isn’t the only entity setting deadlines for us to up our online security game. Now, Google is throwing its weight around too.

Google has slowly been encouraging stronger security practices over the past few years. Earlier this year, Google announced a deadline for websites to upgrade from HTTP to HTTPS. That deadline is almost upon us: July 2018.

Popularised by titles such as Serial, Stuff You Should Know and Ted Radio Hour, the humble podcast raked in $314m (£235m) in ad spend throughout 2017 in the US, according to new research by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC US.

That’s an 86% hike on 2016, while the study forecasts revenues on the channel to hit $659 million by 2020.

Of the self-reported data provided by top podcast companies in the study - including Audioboom, How Stuff Works and ESPN Radio - revenue for 2017 sat at...